William McGurn:When Life Imitates ‘The Sopranos’ Columbus has become another excuse to ruin a celebration of America.
When “The Sopranos” took up the issue of Christopher Columbus back in 2002, the episode was widely panned as the series’ worst.
The show features Tony Soprano’s son reading Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” at the breakfast table—and then dismissing Columbus as a “slave trader” to his parents’ irritation. Likewise, members of Tony’s crew learn of a scheduled protest by Native Americans at a local Columbus Day parade, and then go to bust it up. In a discussion with his associates, one of them tells Tony that Columbus was “no better than Adolf Hitler. ” By the end, we have real life: Even the gangsters are divided, and everyone is aggrieved.
In its own time, critics ripped the episode as inauthentic. Fifteen years later, it looks spot on. Not for its depiction of Italian-Americans, but for the way it captures the strife and mindlessness that are the harvest of progressive protests pretending to be about diversity and expanded respect for other cultures.
In the run-up to this Monday’s parades and commemorations, one Antifa group called for a “Deface Columbus Day” in support of indigenous peoples who have been victims of “colonialism and genocide.” Some didn’t need the call: Even before the holiday weekend, Columbus statues across America have been beheaded, sledgehammered and splashed with paint.
In response to the provocations, some have tried reason. Christopher Scalia, a media consultant for the National Christopher Columbus Association, says the organization has just launched a new webpage called TruthAboutColumbus.com in hopes of putting forward a more balanced portrait of the man. Columbus, it says, was both a man of his time and a man ahead of his time.
But for all the talk about the “real” Columbus, protesters are unlikely to take up the invitation for further study and debate. For the defining fact of the modern progressive is that he is a pest, and what he wants here is simply to ruin any public celebration an ordinary American might enjoy, whether it be Italian-Americans celebrating Columbus or NFL fans sitting down to watch a game.
Ditto for the call to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous People’s Day. Few Americans would have an issue with dedicating a day to the achievements of our continent’s native peoples, or even with the claim that these achievements have not been given their just due. But again, the anti-Columbus movement is not about making room for the celebration of indigenous peoples. It’s about taking away a holiday enjoyed by others, or at least creating enough dissonance to suck the life out of it.
Their problem is that Columbus is not so easy to exorcise from American life. At the time of the Revolutionary War, Columbus symbolized the New World and its break from the Old. Still later the idealized Columbus, which was feminized along classical lines, became even more important than the man. There’s a reason the nation’s capital became the District of Columbia.
Later, Catholic immigrants—and not only Italians—saw in Columbus a way to connect their faith, which many American-born citizens regarded as alien, to their new home. It is no coincidence, for example, that the University of Notre Dame’s main building features a series of Columbus murals that depict the story of what some regard as America’s Catholic founding. CONTINUE AT SITE
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